Mastering Marketing Automation As A Competitive Advantage

Today, technological innovations continue to disrupt and reshape how various industries operate. One of the most popular trends that has generated a lot of attention across numerous companies is definitely automation. Automation, as its name suggests, is the process of automating various tasks. In most cases, companies automate mundane and repetitive tasks to save money and time but automation can easily go beyond that today.

In most cases, companies leverage automation in marketing, in order to improve the efficiency of their efforts. Automation as a concept has existed for a long time now but only recently has it experienced major improvements and advancements.

As a matter of fact, the popularity of automation is estimated to be worth $7.63 billion by 2025. However, even though automation is a familiar term, not every company is using it or they're not using it to its fullest potential. Automation can provide numerous benefits to companies and it can even become a major competitive advantage. With that in mind, here's how mastering marketing automation can turn into a competitive advantage.

Improved Customer Experience

Nowadays, customer experience is a crucial factor that determines a company's success. The fact of the matter is that consumers today are no longer searching for businesses that can provide good quality products or service but businesses that can also provide a unique experience. In fact, 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for an improved experience from brands. 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for an improved experience from brands. Click To Tweet Automation can deliver on that promise.

Automation can not only schedule marketing promotions to be launched at the right time and on the right channels but it can also leverage personalization to improve the overall appeal of such offers and promotions. What's more, 93% of companies that successfully leveraged personalization as a result of marketing automation have experienced an increase in conversion rates. 93% of companies that successfully leveraged personalization as a result of marketing automation have experienced an increase in conversion rates. Click To Tweet However, in order to properly use automation to improve customer experience, you must align your efforts with your goals.

Save Time and Money

Today, marketing primarily revolves around content. The main reason is that content is the most effective form of marketing, which is why it's considered king. Content keeps the audiences engaged and delivers value to them by educating, informing and entertaining them.

Companies that fail to publish new and relevant content to their audience on a regular basis will lose their relevance, as well as their competitive edge. However, with the help of automation, content creation, optimization and publishing can be made fast and seamless.

Simply put, automation is a software that can automate content sharing and keep your audience engaged on every step of their buyer's journey. For instance, you can keep your audience engaged on every step ranging from implementing a visitor management solution at your reception to scheduling content posting on social media. In other words, automation can save you both time and money throughout your omnichannel marketing efforts.

Lead Nurturing

As mentioned before, content is a crucial factor in every marketing campaign. When it comes to automation, the main takeaway and also the main advantage is that it allows you to properly research your target audience, segment customers, develop the right content for them and automatically trigger actions based on your audience's behavior.

That includes activities such as sending a personalized email, posting a social media message, following up with a visitor on your website and so on. All of these activities have a purpose to generate and nurture qualified leads.

The main reason this is important is that nurtured leads produce 20% more sales opportunities than leads that aren't nurtured. Nurtured leads produce 20% more sales opportunities than leads that aren't nurtured. Click To Tweet In addition, companies that leverage marketing automation to nurture prospects can generate up to 451% more qualified leads. Companies that leverage marketing automation to nurture prospects can generate up to 451% more qualified leads. Click To Tweet This can be a major competitive advantage over companies that aren't using automation in their marketing efforts.

Customer Retention

Today, too many companies solely focus on customer acquisition instead of customer retention. Loyal customers can potentially be worth more to your company than the new customers you manage to bring in. With that in mind, it's 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer as opposed to retaining a customer. It's 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer as opposed to retaining a customer. Click To Tweet

In addition, return customers can even spend as much as 67% more than new ones. Return customers can even spend as much as 67% more than new ones. Click To Tweet That being said, you can leverage marketing automation to streamline your customer retention and loyalty strategies. You can basically automate any activity that will re-establish the relationship you have with a customer, such as send out exclusive offers or promotions, send review or feedback requests, activate engagement campaigns and so on.

That way, you'll not just be able to improve customer retention and loyalty rates but also increase the lifetime value of your customers. After all, even the post-purchase engagement is vital, in order to ensure that your company holds a competitive advantage over other brands you're competing against.

Marketing automation is more than just a buzz-word in today's competitive landscape. Companies that are able to leverage this feature to its fullest potential are also able to improve their efficiency and their overall performance on the market. In other words, that means that companies that successfully leverage automation in their marketing efforts are also the ones holding the competitive edge over everyone else.

Emma Miller

A digital marketer from Sydney. Works as a blogger, Senior Editor for Bizzmark blog and a lecturer at Melbourne University. Tweets industry related articles.